Chris Hilleke

Chris Hilleke is a filmmaker located in Birmingham, AL who's been making motion pictures in one way or another for almost two decades. As a die-hard independent he writes, edits, scores and directs but it's his cinematography that's kept food on the table and small budgets available for his own work. Over the years he's traveled the world shooting everything from corporate video, commercials, reality TV and focus groups to short and feature-length narrative and documentary films.

Some of his more notable feature-length contributions of cinematography include the thriller, A Horrible Way to Die by longtime collaborator Adam Wingard, a sex comedy, Autoerotic by Joe Swanberg and, most recently, the HBO documentary Gideon's Army directed by Dawn Porter which premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival to win the Best Editing Award for US Documentaries.

His corporate clients have included (to name only a few) Converse, Under Armour, John Deere, HBO and Mercedes-Benz and his work has been seen through conduits such as IFC, TLC, Food Network, HGTV, Netflix, Anchor Bay and HBO.

He began making films to connect with those around him in a creative and enduring way and to eventually spend all his time making his own films to share. With each year he gets closer to living that dream. Between gigs as a DP he's managed to produce a slue of his own award-winning narrative and documentary short films including the 2009 Sidewalk Film Festival's Audience Choice Award Winner Some of What I Know About Tommy which follows a man struggling with Paranoid Schizophrenia in Hilleke's home neighborhood, Five Points South.